Tag: Team

A game-changing idea is only one of the ingredients you will need to launch a successful new business. Without the right team and a commitment to ongoing fundraising, your brilliant new venture will flounder. This article is the first of five in a series by a venture capital expert who...

In a startup things move constantly, roles change and within a few months people swing from one side of the spectrum to the other depending on their immediate needs. This works well when the team is small and people feel ownership of the whole project. I’ve had multiple roles...

I recently listed co-founder asymmetry as one of the key failure conditions for startups. While definitely a major cause of startup collapse, there is one scenario where co-founder asymmetry can work well enough: university spin-outs where you have student-professor partnership. Students don’t have the expertise and seniority of their...

You are managing a startup. It is growing quickly and you have personally become the entire human resources department. And admit it, you under estimated the time it takes to find the right person who will understand the business vision and fit in with your culture. Are you meeting...

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a situation that we all fear and try to avoid as much as possible: I was lying in a chair while a complete stranger poked around in my mouth with instruments that seem to have their origin in a medieval...

I have been on a bit of a kick about employee incentive plans lately, and observed an interesting trend earlier this year while we were looking to hire a CFO here at TandemLaunch Technologies. Based on the limited sample of a few dozen finance executives who I interviewed, it...

In my last blog post I talked about the fundamentals of effective employee incentive plans: Proportionality, Transparency, Appropriateness, and Certainty. To my mind of thinking, creating linearity in your employee incentive plans is essential to achieve Transparency and Proportionality, and I’d like to elaborate on that a bit using the...

The purpose of incentive plans is to do exactly what the name implies – incentivise the people in your company (both executives and employees) to contribute more than they normally would. In other words, you want them to work harder, move faster, take on more ownership, and generally make...

The CTO fills a critical role in a technology startup. The title is really broad, and people tend to cling to different aspects of it, but what do you really need your CTO to do in a startup? Here’s a quick breakdown for aspiring Chief Technology (or Technical) Officers....

Finding a good cofounder is a key ingredient of a successful startup. Having had the opportunity to work with a variety of co-founders over the years, and now pairing up with individual co-founders for TandemLaunch portfolio investments, I have developed a couple rules of thumb for what to look...